Mark had been in Senner huts before, so that he was not unprepared to step into a tunnel made of cheese. It was not the overpowering smell that was strange to him – but a sense of leaping terror that greeted their entrance. The dim light of one candle by the window flickered over the three stricken occupants of the little hut. A boy and a girl sat bolt upright on a bench staring at them with eyes that looked as if they had been prised open by fright; and an old man lying on a bunk in the corner whimpered like a frightened dog. There were several empty bunks round the walls, a stove, a table, and where there were not bunks shelves for pans containing milk that was hardening into cheeses.
The hands of the two young people gripped the bench they sat on as if they felt themselves being forcibly dragged away from it. Ida’s quick ‘Grüss Gott!’ made them relax slowly, but the old man still whimpered, and the look of violent exhausting terror lingered in their eyes.
Ida sat down on the nearest bench and began to explain to them, that she and Mark were tired after an eight hours’ climb and benighted. They would be thankful for a night’s rest. She told them that they were doctors studying herbs and flowers, ‘Wir sind Oesterreicher’, she finished quietly. 199The girl jumped up as if released by a spring; washed two chipped mugs in a bucket; filled them to the brim with fresh cow’s milk, and set a stout slab of their latest cheese before her guests. It was all they had in the hut, she explained, to offer them. The boy’s terror also died down; they even began to talk about themselves a little, they were brother and sister, and came from the village of Reichenau in the valley. They too had an uncle who collected herbs and often they helped him. It was a way of passing the time like any other and he had told them what to look for, and where it would be likely to grow. They had quite a collection already though they had only been up two weeks. They kept their herbs in a shed behind the hut with the finished cheeses.
The sound of their voices seemed to reassure the old man in the corner for he stopped whimpering. But they all three suddenly became dumb and motionless again, when Ida explained that if they saw any Germans, she hoped they would not mention Mark and herself, nor say that they had spent the night there. ‘These ones,’ Ida said quietly, ‘interfere too much with simple people like ourselves. We get into trouble without reason, so that it is better to keep them ignorant of who we are, or what we do.’
The heartfelt ‘Gewiss!’ that both boy and girl uttered simultaneously showed what they too felt about their conquerors. Ida and Mark finished their simple meal, talking companionably about cows, goats, their pasture, and the herbs. Not till they had re-washed their mugs and were making their brief preparations for the night, did Ida ask casually, ‘And this old man – he looks feeble to be up so high on the mountain – and on your hands as well as the beasts! Has he had an illness?’
Seppel and Anna looked doubtfully, first at the old man, and then at each other. At last Seppel said cautiously, ‘We 200found him in the snow – our first week up. It was a slight spring fall – but he was finished. He could do no more. However it was his mountain so we took him in; and we shall care for him till we go down with the cows in the autumn. Perhaps by then he will be well! He costs us nothing! He takes only milk. But we too – we feel like you about the Germans. Ever since they came there has been nothing but trouble. We are told by our new schoolmaster, and the priest, that it is a very good thing to have the Germans with us – they are our brothers – our stronger brothers – and we shall become prosperous and strong because of their rule. But we cannot really believe this! You see that man over there – he isn’t old – he comes from Dachau – he is only twenty-four! We knew him because he and his brother Wilhelm had the farm of the Drei Schlimme Räuber and Wilhelm still owns it – there he works of course – as we all must for the Nazis. When Hans escaped from Dachau – because they didn’t let him out – he hid in a drain while they were doing outside work and he got away into the woods – so he thought they would send first to see if he had gone home to the farm; and he came up to this hut instead – on the chance that it might be open – and fortunately it was, just open, for we had come up early – and it is his mountain.’
‘I see,’ said Ida gently. She moved quickly across the room, to the remains of what had once been a human being.
It seemed to Mark that it was no longer Ida who bent over the tortured man. She glowed with an exquisite tenderness, her skilled intelligent hands eased and calmed him by their touch. ‘Bring the candle here, child,’ she said to Anna. ‘Let us see if together we cannot make him more comfortable.’
In an hour everything in the hut had changed. Seppel 201brought in a store of herbs from the shed, and Mark sorted them out, helping Ida to prepare a solution that might relieve, if it could not heal, Hans’s appalling injuries.
There was not a whole part in his poor ruined body, his organs had been kicked out of place, his back was cut into lumps of raw uneven flesh; he was not a man any more.
As Ida dressed his wounds he began to talk excitedly in a thin high voice. He did not tell them what he had done, because that he did not know – no one had ever told him why he was taken away and tortured; but what was done to him, he told.
Twice, Mark, blind and sick with rage, went out into the remote inviolable moonlight because he could not control himself, before the senseless cruelty he had to see and hear. When the long tale came to its wavering finish, Ida began to talk to Hans, soothingly, tirelessly, pouring life into him through her voice and her eyes. She was as radiant, as if she had a secret joy in her power to give, until hope reached his worn-out, broken heart; and Mark saw him actually smile back at her.
‘But what she says isn’t true!’ Mark told himself indignantly. ‘Can such a wreck get his strength back? Can he take up any sort of real life again – when what they’ve made of him isn’t a man at all? And besides he daren’t go back! There’ll be some sort of a watch set on his farm and his brother – Wilhelm – well, brothers have been known to betray each other before now – those children looked odd when they said he was still on his farm! Not all peasants are kind by nature or religion! Isn’t she giving him a hope that is a mere will-o’-the-wisp? And why is she like a woman suddenly – why is she so moving and so tender – it’s the difference between a battery turned on and a battery turned off – she’s making him believe in something he’ll 202never have – as if it were in his own power!’ At last Mark’s watchful eyes clouded over; Anna and Seppel were already fast asleep; but Ida still bent over the poor broken body she knew she could not mend.
When Mark woke, he found the two young people up and out with their cows. Hans lay peacefully asleep and Ida sat on the doorstep, drinking the clean air.
The sky was cloudy, and a föhn wind blew. Anna brought them their milk, warm from the cow; and Ida gave them some money to help them with their needs. They did not want to take it, but Ida was firm, and said, ‘You might have a need – suddenly. No one knows now what they will need to-day! But be careful not to spend more than you usually do at a time. Lest the Germans are surprised to find you possess any!’
‘To think we were afraid of you!’ Anna said, as she and Seppel clasped their hands in farewell, ‘and you are angels of God and wise as hermits. Still, Frau Doktor, we shall say nothing – nothing ever – because we think as you think – we feel as you feel! Yet the priest might think differently. What is a sin – what is not a sin – we cannot tell now any more!’
‘But we know we are children of God,’ Seppel said coming up with his goats, ‘and if we are children of God – we must love one another!’ He spoke with vehement earnestness, the little kids nuzzling fearlessly against his bare knees, his eyes fixed on Mark, as if he wanted another man’s support, for he was only sixteen, and that is not very old to know the whole duty of a Christian.
Mark, much to his own astonishment, found himself saying with equal earnestness, ‘Yes, that is all we need to know.’
They shook hands firmly as if they had settled something 203final, and satisfactory. Mark looked back twice, to see the goats playing round the boy’s steady figure. Anna had gone back into the hut; but until they were out of sight Seppel stood watching them.
‘I wonder what it was that puzzled those children,’ Mark asked Ida at last. ‘They seemed to think their priest might think they had done wrong – but could any priest want them not to help a sick neighbour?’
Ida walked on in silence for so long a time that Mark thought she had not heard his question. At last she said curtly and without looking at him, ‘You saw the man’s condition? It was incurable. He was only twenty-four – there was no particular reason, however, why he shouldn’t – in that condition – go on living for a long time. Well – I killed him. I always take morphia about now. I had to ask the children’s consent – and they gave it. To-night they will bury him. Could you suppose I would give him a false hope? I gave him instead an evening’s happiness – and eternal peace.’
Mark was silent. They climbed until nothing was round them but the sky. At last Mark said bitterly, ‘You asked them – for their consent, but mine? Why did you leave me out of your consultation – as if I were a child or a stranger?’
‘Ask yourself rather, why should I drag you in?’ Ida replied quickly. ‘You have something to do which is necessary for us all. You must not be hampered by anything else – anything extraneous – an extra danger! This thing that I have done is called murder. Perhaps one or other of those children – though I do not think it – will forget what they now believe – and confess to their priest that I killed Hans of the Drei Schlimme Räuber. Now they cannot connect you with it – your name – your presence has had nothing to do with my crime – that I impressed on them – and they will not forget it.’ 204
‘You expect me to be grateful to you for what you have done?’ demanded Mark. ‘You think I like being sheltered, at your expense?’
‘I have not asked myself what you like,’ Ida said coldly. ‘I alone am responsible for what I do. Personally I am content to have taken away a life of degradation and fear from a fellow man, but you have a code – you have told me about it, and it is not one – though I am sure it expresses you and that you are faithful to it – that I find any need to accept. How could I tell if this particular act – not necessarily considered blameless – might not violate your code?’
‘You might have asked me what I thought about it,’ Mark said with increasing anger. ‘In fact you would have done so had you trusted me.’
Ida was silent for a long time. ‘We live in very curious times,’ she said at last in a softer voice, ‘and “trust” is a very elastic term – to what extent dare we pull this elastic? I myself do not know, Mark – I am your comrade at this moment – I am your happy comrade – more than my will consents to be with you. That we proved to each other yesterday when we made great confidences to each other. I know you for a man who is no liar – you do not boast – you have courage – you are not empty-hearted – these things I have trust in and for some of these things I suppose that you have trust in me. But on this mountain, we have been doing what both of us have been trained for and enjoy. There is no problem in two skilled climbers being at home together on a mountain! But last night we came suddenly on something unpredictable. I had to decide quickly. Suppose I had told you what I meant to do and you had tried to stop me? By a word, those frightened children could have made what I did impossible and how did I know you would not say such a word?’ 205
Mark met her eyes and saw that they were not cold and expressionless any more – they had a life in them that met his own, as if they sought, and expected, understanding.
‘I suppose a man hates to feel left out of a decisive act,’ he said at last reluctantly. ‘I agree with what you did, but it is true – it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do it.’
‘It was not your business,’ Ida reminded him. ‘We must stick always to that. You have only one business here in Austria. But this that I did was my business; it was my business not only as a human being but as an Austrian. That man’s courage was destroyed; if the Germans had turned up he might, to save being sent back to a concentration camp, have given us both away – and the children too might have suffered, for they let us stay. It was not only pity that made me kill him.’
‘It was my safety!’ cried Mark, stopping dead in his tracks.
‘Call it what you like,’ Ida said impatiently. ‘Half Europe will be dead before this war is finished. You exaggerate the importance of a human being. I did what I saw there was to be done – that is all!’
‘There are some things that can’t be exaggerated,’ said Mark quietly. ‘What you did for me – is perhaps one of them.’
Ida made no answer to this statement. They were off the ridge now, and difficult rock climbing lay before them. They roped in silence, and except for the quick exchange of their instant needs and actions, said no more to each other for an hour or two. But Mark felt as if their harmony of the day before had come back to them. He could even forgive Ida his gratitude. He reminded himself of what she had told him yesterday – the man she had loved had failed her – obviously he had not given her any reason for confidence; 206so it was not surprising that she was slow to feel it for any other man. Curiously enough Mark’s own confidence in Ida had deepened. He had spoken the truth when he said he had not been sure whether Mary was honest or not; but he knew that he was sure Ida was. Mary had been so beautiful that whatever she did seemed right, but Ida had no such charm for him – no such beauty. Mark was prepared to judge her harshly – more harshly than if she had been a man. He found that he even wished to judge her harshly though he was not sure why.
After they had safely negotiated their last chimney, and come out once more on a bare and level ridge, Ida said to him abruptly, ‘That little rise in front of us will show you Trafoi. I shall go down there, towards Landeck – and by nightfall you will reach your farm. There is a path nearly all the way.’
‘Is your way down difficult?’ he asked her.
‘It is very easy,’ Ida told him.
They reached the rise and saw far below them the little ribbon of the pass winding away between a range of near and frowning peaks.
‘I am sorry – you will have no food till nightfall. I forgot to ask them for a little cheese.’
‘I am glad you forgot something,’ Mark said, looking down at her, with a reluctant smile. ‘It is rather pleasant to exchange roles sometimes. I have remembered the cheese, and brought enough for both of us.’
‘Then we may as well sit down and eat it,’ Ida said promptly, returning his smile.
The sun had come out in a lazy makeshift fashion often vanishing behind clouds and cooled by a constant teasing wind. Everything looked plainer, the mountains, Ida’s face, the shrunken valley in the distance. A thin screen of bitter 207sorrel, growing beneath the shelter of the rock they leaned against, shivered violently in the growing wind.
‘And now, Auf Wiederseh’n,’ Ida told him. She stood as high as his shoulder, very erect and gay, her eyes sparkling with amusement.
‘We’ve been very dull to-day,’ she said. ‘Almost like an old married couple, who have exhausted each other’s histories. This makes one feel – as I confess I feel to-day – a great deal safer!’
‘Safer from what?’ Mark asked her bluntly, for he himself had ceased to feel any safety.
‘From all the dangers that beset us, of course,’ Ida said laughingly. ‘Amongst others, that we might find each other too attractive. This we have certainly overcome by the help of our mutual boredom – a lunch consisting entirely of cold cheese – and a föhn wind! Let us be thankful for our mercies since we have not very many to be thankful for! Once more Auf Wiederseh’n!’
She was gone before Mark had time to do more than control an impulse that assailed him, to take her slender shoulders between his hands and hold her back by force, as if he couldn’t afford to be without her.